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Interview Questions

Review this list of 4,415 interview questions and answers verified by hiring managers and candidates.
  • Meta logoAsked at Meta 
    Video answer for 'Design the system architecture for WhatsApp.'
    +5

    "Excellent job Roshan, really liked the explanation. Which software were you using to explain the system design diagrams?"

    Krishnan S. - "Excellent job Roshan, really liked the explanation. Which software were you using to explain the system design diagrams?"See full answer

    System Design
    Technical
  • +1

    "Clarifying question: Am I the first one to notice the fire, or there are people already on it? Extent and source of fire - I am assuming it's localized and I am inside the data center, safe so far. Response: It is an emergency. I will do and coordinate the people to do the following in parallel, if I am the first one to know. Get immediate attention of folks in the data center. Get someone and many people to call 911 and security. Coordinate to have people in need evacuated. Turn off th"

    Bg - "Clarifying question: Am I the first one to notice the fire, or there are people already on it? Extent and source of fire - I am assuming it's localized and I am inside the data center, safe so far. Response: It is an emergency. I will do and coordinate the people to do the following in parallel, if I am the first one to know. Get immediate attention of folks in the data center. Get someone and many people to call 911 and security. Coordinate to have people in need evacuated. Turn off th"See full answer

    Technical
  • Stripe logoAsked at Stripe 
    Video answer for 'Design a Distributed LRU Cache'
    +6

    "One good reason for using the doubly linked list is that to remove an accessed item in the list from its existing position say in the middle of the list and move it to the head, you need to update the previous node's next pointer and the next node's previous pointer. A singly linked list only has next pointers, so removing from the middle would require traversing from the head to find the previous node which requires O(n) time. A doubly linked list allows O(1) removal from any position because w"

    Javed S. - "One good reason for using the doubly linked list is that to remove an accessed item in the list from its existing position say in the middle of the list and move it to the head, you need to update the previous node's next pointer and the next node's previous pointer. A singly linked list only has next pointers, so removing from the middle would require traversing from the head to find the previous node which requires O(n) time. A doubly linked list allows O(1) removal from any position because w"See full answer

    Engineering Manager
    System Design
  • "The question is about Netflix users decreasing 10%, not about delivery app."

    corrie881 - "The question is about Netflix users decreasing 10%, not about delivery app."See full answer

    Analytical
    Execution
  • Amazon logoAsked at Amazon 
    Video answer for 'Design a rate limiter.'
    +9

    "Rate Limiter is to limit the number of request from a particular IP Address. Rate limiter will block the IP address to reduce the load on server. It should be highly available and handle concurrent requests. Blocked IP addresses should be kept in a pool which is present in shared cache. We need to keep threshold value after it reaches threshold value it should start blocking IP address. All these ip address to be kept in No SQL DB. Batch will run that will clear the cache and delete all the bloc"

    Ashish G. - "Rate Limiter is to limit the number of request from a particular IP Address. Rate limiter will block the IP address to reduce the load on server. It should be highly available and handle concurrent requests. Blocked IP addresses should be kept in a pool which is present in shared cache. We need to keep threshold value after it reaches threshold value it should start blocking IP address. All these ip address to be kept in No SQL DB. Batch will run that will clear the cache and delete all the bloc"See full answer

    Software Engineer
    System Design
    +1 more
  • 🧠 Want an expert answer to a question? Saving questions lets us know what content to make next.

  • +15

    "Clarifying questions: Open metrics - Number of times users open the google document on a given day 10% decline - is it a gradual decline or steep decline? (since when) Do we witness decline from a specific geography? Decline for consumers or enterprise customers? Decline from web or mobile app? Review logs or bug reports to check if there are customer issues reports Internal Determine if a particular release is causing the issue Review other metrics to check if fewer do"

    Sahil A. - "Clarifying questions: Open metrics - Number of times users open the google document on a given day 10% decline - is it a gradual decline or steep decline? (since when) Do we witness decline from a specific geography? Decline for consumers or enterprise customers? Decline from web or mobile app? Review logs or bug reports to check if there are customer issues reports Internal Determine if a particular release is causing the issue Review other metrics to check if fewer do"See full answer

    Product Manager
    Analytical
    +1 more
  • +8

    "How I would approach this question: Understand the goal of the customer service platform: What is the main business goal of this company and how is the customer service platform serving the company goals? For this question, I'm assuming the user journey is that customers come to the customer service platform when they run into issues. Thus, ultimately the customer service platform is feeding into the top line business metric of customer retention. Do customers keep"

    Kay T. - "How I would approach this question: Understand the goal of the customer service platform: What is the main business goal of this company and how is the customer service platform serving the company goals? For this question, I'm assuming the user journey is that customers come to the customer service platform when they run into issues. Thus, ultimately the customer service platform is feeding into the top line business metric of customer retention. Do customers keep"See full answer

    Product Manager
    Analytical
    +1 more
  • Meta logoAsked at Meta 

    "Discussed: Requirements of the system: latency language modality (assume keyboard typing) availability of data (assume cold start) success metric (accuracy of next word predicted?, or minimize false positives? -> accuracy to start) Data collection and processing: design ethical user experiments to collect typed out data design a simple tokenization strategy (word level encoding, character level encoding, byte-pair encodings, and discuss tradeoffs) collect data, and split"

    Adam L. - "Discussed: Requirements of the system: latency language modality (assume keyboard typing) availability of data (assume cold start) success metric (accuracy of next word predicted?, or minimize false positives? -> accuracy to start) Data collection and processing: design ethical user experiments to collect typed out data design a simple tokenization strategy (word level encoding, character level encoding, byte-pair encodings, and discuss tradeoffs) collect data, and split"See full answer

    Machine Learning Engineer
    System Design
  • +9

    "Designing a system to deny services to requests from banned IPs involves integrating real-time IP checking with your service architecture. Here’s a detailed outline of how you can design such a system: System Design Overview The goal is to ensure that your service can efficiently check incoming requests against a list of banned IPs and deny access when necessary. The system will leverage an external API, security.gov.x, to determine if an IP address is blocked or allowed. **Key Compone"

    Palak A. - "Designing a system to deny services to requests from banned IPs involves integrating real-time IP checking with your service architecture. Here’s a detailed outline of how you can design such a system: System Design Overview The goal is to ensure that your service can efficiently check incoming requests against a list of banned IPs and deny access when necessary. The system will leverage an external API, security.gov.x, to determine if an IP address is blocked or allowed. **Key Compone"See full answer

    Software Engineer
    System Design
    +2 more
  • Apple logoAsked at Apple 
    +2

    "To answer this, I will focus my efforts on explaining the most common type of API used in most modern software development applications - the REST API. For the purpose of simplicity, I will also keep the topics of Authorization and Authentication out of the mix. In essence, an API is a group of logic that takes in a specific set of inputs and responds with a specific set of outputs. This is analogous to going to a drive-thru and placing an order for a meal. When you give an API a bunch of"

    Pathworks P. - "To answer this, I will focus my efforts on explaining the most common type of API used in most modern software development applications - the REST API. For the purpose of simplicity, I will also keep the topics of Authorization and Authentication out of the mix. In essence, an API is a group of logic that takes in a specific set of inputs and responds with a specific set of outputs. This is analogous to going to a drive-thru and placing an order for a meal. When you give an API a bunch of"See full answer

    Software Engineer
    System Design
    +3 more
  • +2

    "Why is the value of an Android user only considering incremental clicks on ads instead of all clicks on ads?"

    So X. - "Why is the value of an Android user only considering incremental clicks on ads instead of all clicks on ads?"See full answer

    Estimation
  • Anthropic logoAsked at Anthropic 
    Video answer for 'How do you approach GenAI safety in consumer products?'
    +10

    "I’d start by clarifying what the business outcome we are driving/what is the context of the AI platform I am owning. Assuming I am giving no further info, I would start with framing why safety is a must with GenAI, the market being saturated with new LLMs daily, so trust is the main differentiator for retention and defensibility. Safety failures can trigger regulatory action (FTC, EU, etc.), reputational damage, or user churn. Then I would identify some Key Buckets: • Kids/teen protections ("

    Matthew W. - "I’d start by clarifying what the business outcome we are driving/what is the context of the AI platform I am owning. Assuming I am giving no further info, I would start with framing why safety is a must with GenAI, the market being saturated with new LLMs daily, so trust is the main differentiator for retention and defensibility. Safety failures can trigger regulatory action (FTC, EU, etc.), reputational damage, or user churn. Then I would identify some Key Buckets: • Kids/teen protections ("See full answer

    Product Manager
    Artificial Intelligence
    +1 more
  • Airbnb logoAsked at Airbnb 
    Video answer for 'Design Airbnb's search functionality.'
    +2

    "The back-of-the-envelope calculation is very well done!"

    Ushita S. - "The back-of-the-envelope calculation is very well done!"See full answer

    System Design
  • +1

    "Great question! Last year, we were working on a critical project to develop a real-time risk analytics platform. This platform was designed to provide our traders with instantaneous risk metrics, allowing them to make informed decisions in a fast-paced trading environment. Midway through the project, we faced a significant issue: our chosen data processing framework was not performing as expected under the high data throughput required by our trading algorithms. This was causing unacceptable lat"

    Scott S. - "Great question! Last year, we were working on a critical project to develop a real-time risk analytics platform. This platform was designed to provide our traders with instantaneous risk metrics, allowing them to make informed decisions in a fast-paced trading environment. Midway through the project, we faced a significant issue: our chosen data processing framework was not performing as expected under the high data throughput required by our trading algorithms. This was causing unacceptable lat"See full answer

    Product Manager
    Behavioral
  • Amazon logoAsked at Amazon 

    "We will not always have all the required data to make a decision quickly. We need to work with ambiguity effectively by tying up the available facts with intuition."

    Sankar S. - "We will not always have all the required data to make a decision quickly. We need to work with ambiguity effectively by tying up the available facts with intuition."See full answer

    Software Engineer
    Behavioral
    +1 more
  • +13

    "Thanks for the question. The way I would like to proceed with this question is firstly, to get more context about the problem by asking some clarifying questions and narrowing the scope. Then, I would like to break the problem into smaller components to understand where exactly our problem lies. Then make a user journey for that particular area and identify the technical and non-technical factors which might affect this change specific to our company/product. Post that, I'll analyse the external"

    Nikita G. - "Thanks for the question. The way I would like to proceed with this question is firstly, to get more context about the problem by asking some clarifying questions and narrowing the scope. Then, I would like to break the problem into smaller components to understand where exactly our problem lies. Then make a user journey for that particular area and identify the technical and non-technical factors which might affect this change specific to our company/product. Post that, I'll analyse the external"See full answer

    Analytical
    Execution
  • Google logoAsked at Google 
    Video answer for 'Merge Intervals'
    +45

    "const mergeIntervals = (intervals) => { const compare = (a, b) => { if(a[0] b[0]) return 1 else if(a[0] === b[0]) { return a[1] - b[1] } } let current = [] const result = [] const sorted = intervals.sort(compare) for(let i = 0; i = b[0]) current[1] = b[1] els"

    Kofi N. - "const mergeIntervals = (intervals) => { const compare = (a, b) => { if(a[0] b[0]) return 1 else if(a[0] === b[0]) { return a[1] - b[1] } } let current = [] const result = [] const sorted = intervals.sort(compare) for(let i = 0; i = b[0]) current[1] = b[1] els"See full answer

    Software Engineer
    Data Structures & Algorithms
    +6 more
  • Accenture logoAsked at Accenture 
    Video answer for 'Design an AI data product.'
    +2

    "Understand the business problem: Identify the business problem that the AI data product is intended to solve. Identify the target audience: Understand who will be using the data and what problem they will be solving for using the data. This will inform the features and functionality that should be included in the product. Gather and preprocess the data: Collect and preprocess the data that is relevant to the problem that it is being solved for. This will inform the AI algorithm"

    M D. - "Understand the business problem: Identify the business problem that the AI data product is intended to solve. Identify the target audience: Understand who will be using the data and what problem they will be solving for using the data. This will inform the features and functionality that should be included in the product. Gather and preprocess the data: Collect and preprocess the data that is relevant to the problem that it is being solved for. This will inform the AI algorithm"See full answer

    Data Analyst
    Product Design
    +1 more
  • Uber logoAsked at Uber 
    Video answer for 'Design Uber.'
    +2

    "Very helpful! But I have a question: the location of drivers can be changing every minute, so won't reading from location cache returning stale data?"

    Linying W. - "Very helpful! But I have a question: the location of drivers can be changing every minute, so won't reading from location cache returning stale data?"See full answer

    System Design
  • Anthropic logoAsked at Anthropic 
    Video answer for 'Design a key-value store.'

    "Simple file system ( Hash Map , LSM trees), and consistent hashing. I failed to discuss about conflicts ( Versioning)"

    V V. - "Simple file system ( Hash Map , LSM trees), and consistent hashing. I failed to discuss about conflicts ( Versioning)"See full answer

    Software Engineer
    System Design
    +2 more
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